1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an object recognition method and object recognition apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
The development of an advanced road traffic system (ITS: Intelligent Transport System) is underway in recent years. Vehicles used in the ITS are “Advanced Safety Vehicles (ASV)” provided with advanced intelligence resulting from full use of electronics technologies and significantly enhanced safety.
An Advanced Safety Vehicle (ASV) is provided with functions of supporting safe driving, preventing accidents or diminishing accidents and damages by detecting the traffic surroundings of the vehicle and road surface conditions, etc. using cameras and sensors.
Implementing various functions of such an Advanced Safety Vehicle (ASV) requires information acquired by cameras and sensors mounted on the own vehicle to be processed in real time to speedily obtain information such as the existence of other vehicles coming closer and distance to those vehicles.
Moreover, calculating the distance to nearby vehicles or obstacles requires three-dimensional image processing.
Three-dimensional image processing generally involves an enormous amount of calculations and processing delays become a problem. In addition, the Advanced Safety Vehicle (ASV) needs to monitor the surroundings of the own vehicle, and therefore needs to be equipped with a plurality of cameras (also a plurality of sensors).
As the number of cameras increases, the amount of information subject to image processing also grows drastically. On top of this, the volume of memory required for an image processing apparatus also increases, entailing increased amounts of hardware and cost.
Moreover, it is a procedure involving considerable difficulty to take pictures of objects against a complicated background, apply image processing thereto, recognize the objects and calculate the distance to those objects in real time. For example, simply reducing the resolution of images to save the amount of processing calculation and memory, etc. will make recognition of the objects itself difficult and the reliability of the distances calculated using the results of recognition of those objects becomes a problem.
The present invention has been implemented taking into account the points described above and it is an object of the present invention to provide a practicable object recognition method and object recognition apparatus capable of making the efficiency (processing speed) of image processing compatible with the accuracy of recognition of objects and the accuracy of measurement of distances to the objects, etc.